Customer Reviews

Crescent Moon

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Jeremy is thirteen years old, living in the early 1900s. He lives close to a river where loggers float newly felled pine logs to be cut in the town's sawmills. The loggers have destroyed the pine forest, though, and this year is to be the last time logs will travel Jeremy's river. Jeremy's uncle is a woodcarver who has decided to memorialize the last logging run with a special carving--a beautiful life-sized Indian maiden. He will collaborate with a member of the Chippewa tribe, who live outside of town.

This is destined to be a summer of changes for Jeremy. He isn't sure at first what to think of the Indians, but he finds himself falling for the young woman who models for his uncle's statue. Jeremy will be going back to school in the fall, but two of his best friends will have to go to work in a mill, doing manual labor, when their father is disabled in a terrible accident. There is rumbling throughout the logging community of workers unionizing, but those who dare to try to recruit members are targeted and beaten. Everything is changing, and Jeremy spends the summer trying to work out his place in the world.

The history in this book and the sad story of a town moving toward becoming obsolete is interesting. However, I felt as though the relationships in this story were far too sanitized to be believable. Whites were living in harmony with blacks and Indians, and life was very easy for almost everyone in this book..

This book is a page-turner, with several plot threads that paint a complete picture of life in a logging community at the end of an era. Carter's characters are well-drawn and believable, memorable months after reading the book. The book's challenges of everyday life have ties to contemporary life with themes of cultures clashing, labor struggles, gangs, and the desperation of poverty. It's a gripping book this reader will long remember.

In this excellent novel for young teenagers, Carter opens up aworld almost totally foreign to contemporary Americans, even though itis less than a century removed from us. Jeremy, his widowed father, and his father's uncle, along with all their neighbors in the north woods, are witnessing the end of a way of life-- the last cutting of one of the great forests of the northern Midwest and thus the last great logroll down the river to the mills-- along with the growth of a newer aspect of factory and working class life, the spread of the unions. Though Jeremy's father is a sales representative, he sympathizes with the needs and concerns of the lumberjacks and mill-workers, as does his uncle, whose way of life is also dying: he carves wooden displays for shopkeepers-- a wooden hat for a haberdasher, and so forth-- but knows that soon all those shopkeepers will be using words and not images to convey their messages. So Uncle Mac, with the help of two native Americans, turns his hand to one last great carving-- a full-body "Indian" maiden-- as a sort of apology for the cigar store Indians that demeaned native Americans. Jeremy is the focal point around which Carter casts these various themes, the maturing and sensitive youth who is ready to have his ideas of the world expanded.